2 new books explore Charles Dickens' messy private life

Dec. 26, 2012
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'Charles Dickens in Love' by Robert Garnett

by Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

by Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

As we're reminded every year at the time, no other novel has been as widely adapted as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol - on stage, in film and TV, more than 250 versions and counting.

And no other author continues to fascinate other writers as much as the secretive Dickens, whose private life lacked the heartwarming, redemptive happy ending of his classic Christmas tale.

As part of the latest burst of books marking his bicentennial - Dickens was born in 1812 - are two books that explore not just his extraordinary talent and energy but also his complicated and conflicted personal life:

Charles Dickens in Love

Charles Dickens in Love ( * * ½ out of four) by Robert T. Garnett is the more ambitious and academic of the pair. It builds on Claire Tomalin's groundbreaking 1992 book, The Invisible Woman, which strongly made the case that actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan was Dickens' mistress for the last 14 years of his life. (When they met, she was 18, he was 45. He died at 59.)

Garnett, an English professor at Gettysburg College who has written for The Dickens Quarterly, offers a detailed look at three women whom Dickens loved. Anyone who knows anything about Dickens will not be surprised that none of the three was Dickens wife, Catherine, who gave birth to their 10 children.

Yes, 10, plus at least two miscarriages. Dickens himself famously claimed to have raised "the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves."

Beyond Dickens' passionate romance with Ternan - and the circumstantial evidence they had a son who died within months - Garnett explores Dickens' infatuation with two other women.

First came Maria Beadnell - "no doubt vain and flirtatious," Garnett writes - who jilted Dickens two years before he met and married Catherine Hogarth. "With Maria, Dickens had known ecstasy and suffered despair; with Catherine, he avoided risk by lowering his expectations."

Garnett concludes that Dickens' unrequited love taught him crucial lessons: "how passionately he could love and how hard he could work."

Beadnell's rejection, Garnett writes, served as a painful lesson about love - "its devotion, desire, longing and absorption, as well as misery, unhappiness, and desire" - that would enrich Dickens' fiction.

The second woman was Mary Hogarth, his wife's younger sister, who died at 17 of a heart attack in Dickens' arms. All of Dickens fictional deathbeds, Garnett writes, "are indebted to the poignant memory of Mary quietly slipping away in his arms."

Garnett finds "no evidence of any dangerous attraction, much less impropriety" between Dickens and his sister-in-law. Instead, she served as his "virgin icon."

Garnett is an impressive literary detective who distinguishes between what's known and what's speculation. But as a writer, he's not the best stylist, unless you like flourishes such as "the river of life had carried Dickens far downstream" or references to "the labyrinth of Eros."

As a scholar, he's a bit of a showoff - which may work better in the classroom than writing for a general audience.

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens ( * * * ) by Robert Gottlieb is more accessible and conversational. It's an exploration of Dickens' tenuous role as a father and what happened to his children.

Not all were failures, although none lived up to their father's expectations (hence the title). Gottlieb, an accomplished book editor, is bemused by how Dickens not only held his wife solely responsible for what he perceived as his children's failings but also managed to ignore his own involvement in all her pregnancies.

"It's always she who's responsible - his sexual requirements seemed to have nothing to do with it; you would think he was a father only because she made him into one," Gottlieb writes.

A problem with the book is that none of Dickens' children - from Kate, a successful painter, to Plorn, a drunk and a gambler who died in debt in Australia - would merit much attention if it weren't for their father. That said, it's a pleasure to read Gottlieb even when he's merely musing.

Gottlieb finds "almost no overlap" between Dickens' fictional children - the orphaned Oliver Twist, the tragic Smike in Nicholas Nickleby, or the pathetic Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop - and his real kids.

Dickens' son Charley, who became a journalist, wrote that "the children of his brain were much more real to him at times than we were."

To which Gottlieb can add only questions: "Were his versions of his actual children - the feckless sons, the fond daughters - simply further inventions? To them he was compellingly real, but what were they to him?"